December 2, 2010

That’s one infamous thing about me that anyone who knows me even a little bit knows or will find out soon enough. When I first mention it, I get some strange looks and shocked reactions, as if I’d just praised Satan or something. Some wonder if I’m healthy. Some ask if or assume I’m a vegan. A college roommate said “but cheese is a nutrient!” (If that quote hurt your brain a little, that’s nothing. The same girl once told me that I shouldn’t carry such a heavy backpack or I’ll give myself cerebral palsy… yeah.) I’m not really a big fan of dairy products in general. Don’t care for yogurt. Only ever buy milk if it’s to have it with cereal. I like ice cream, of course, but most ice cream has very little milk in it anyway. I was glad to notice on a Cool Whip tub one time that it contains no dairy (or, well, at the time, it does now). I mentioned this to someone and the immediate response was “yeah, I know, that sucks, stick to Redi-Whip instead” or something like that. They just assumed the observation of no dairy was to me a bad thing, but not at all. To be normal, you must want lots and lots of dairy products.

In 2009, Dairy Management worked with Domino’s Pizza on its now-famous “new menu,” otherwise known as “our pizzas no longer taste so much like ketchup-splattered drywall” campaign. Not surprisingly for a bunch of guys who like dairy farmers, this involved adding a lot of cheese to Domino’s pizzas. Forty percent more cheese. So much cheese, in fact, that you can now go over your recommended daily saturated fat level by eating two slices of some of Domino’s pies.

Ah, thanks for the warning, Cracked. I shall be avoiding the new Domino’s pizza then. I avoid pizzas with too much cheese, of course. Pizza cheese’s only function to me is topping-glue. Over copious amounts of tomato sauce!

It’s the United States Department of Agriculture. Granted, the majority of Dairy Management’s funding now comes from fees imposed on American dairy farmers, but last year the USDA added funding to the tune of $5 million. This is despite the fact that other people in the USDA are also using your tax money to continually promote a diet low in saturated fats.

So why the intense government-sponsored focus on cheese, rather than milk or other cow products? Well, over the years Americans have increasingly come to prefer low-fat milk, and dairy farmers have been left with a huge excess of extracted milk fat that they’ve skimmed off it all. We’re talking millions of pounds here. All this fat, and nothing to do with it. So why not make it into cheese, and then spend a lot of money encouraging Americans to eat it?

Yeah, goodness, how dare people try to lower their fat intake? Just pump that crap into them through other, devious ways.

While, true, Cracked is full of shit on occasion and is certainly ableist, very ageist, sexist, and other nasty traits now and then, I was quite glad to see this! Everyone’s all like “oh, Katrina, you’re so weird, you don’t like cheese!” yet I’m not the one falling for government-sponsored “put this milk fat into your body some way or another!” campaigns.

Okay, true, lots of things I do eat are still under the category of some big business and/or the government wanting people to eat it for their own profit beyond that from merely selling the product in general. But the cheese is one I do avoid. Whatever that’s worth.